Editing Debt (section)

=== Governments ===
{{Main|Government debt}}
[[File:1979 $10,000 Treasury Bond .jpg|thumb|right|1979 U.S. Government $10,000 [[treasury bond]]]]
Governments issue debt to pay for ongoing expenses as well as major capital projects. Government debt may be issued by sovereign states as well as by local governments, sometimes known as municipalities.

Debt issued by the government of the United States, called [[United States Treasury security|Treasuries]], serves as a reference point for all other debt.  There are deep, transparent, liquid, and open capital markets for Treasuries.<ref>Lew, Jacob (2016), [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-04-11/america-and-global-economy America and the Global Economy] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181203182710/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-04-11/america-and-global-economy |date=3 December 2018 }}, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016.</ref>  Furthermore, Treasuries are issued in a wide variety of maturities, from one day to thirty years, which facilitates comparing the interest rates on other debt to a security of comparable maturity.  In finance, the theoretical "[[risk-free interest rate]]" is often approximated by practitioners by using the current yield of a Treasury of the same duration.

The overall level of indebtedness by a government is typically shown as a ratio of [[Debt-to-GDP ratio|debt-to-GDP]]. This ratio helps to assess the speed of changes in government indebtedness and the size of the debt due.

The United Nations [[Sustainable Development Goal 17]], an integral part of the [[Sustainable Development Goals|2030 Agenda]] has a target to address the external debt of highly indebted poor countries to reduce debt distress.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Goal 17 {{!}} Department of Economic and Social Affairs|url=https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal17|access-date=2020-09-26|website=sdgs.un.org|archive-date=2 November 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211102145921/https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal17|url-status=live}}</ref>